Iris Murdoch's early works and her struggle to 'write something good' revealed

A new archive of letters by Iris Murdoch, the grande dame of British writers
whose prolific works won her widespread acclaim, has revealed for the first
time her struggles with her early, unpublished novels which have since been
lost.

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Iris Murdoch's first book, Under the Net, was published in 1954Photo: CORBIS

The correspondence between the writer and French novelist Raymond Queneau, bought by Kingston University, in south west London, spanned 29 years and sheds new light on Murdoch's troubled private life and her insecurities about her ability as a writer.

One of her early works featured a "bogus scholar" and may have been inspired by Murdoch's own doubts about her intellectual stature when she studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Cambridge University.

Another idea for a novel is cribbed from a book about telepathy which she eventually abandons.

In the cache of 160 letters, most written when Murdoch was in her late twenties and early thirties and before her marriage to John Bailey, she outlined to Queneau details of the characters and plots she was working on at the end of the 1940s.

The letters reveal a woman riddled with self-doubt who was at times filled with "hatred and contempt" for her prose and wondered if she would "ever write something good".

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Murdoch was thought to have attempted between four and six novels before her first book, Under the Net, was published in 1954. A number of these early manuscripts were destroyed by her in 1986.

Anne Rowe, senior English lecturer and director of the centre for Iris Murdoch studies at Kingston, said: "Her letters to Queneau illustrate the insecurity she felt about her ability to write.

"After reading them one can understand why there were so many false starts.

"The impression that emerges is of a very different – much more insecure – woman than the distinguished Dame of the British Empire, Booker Prize winner and Oxford philosopher that we have come to know.

"Here is a young woman desperate to make her mark on the world and willing to do go to any lengths to get the help she thinks she needs from a master of her craft.

"What she coveted from Queneau was intellectual stimulus and practical help. It's a shame that those other early novels were lost – they may well have embodied her own experiments with form."

Although there was never a physical relationships between Murdoch and Quineau, who was married and only met the novelist a few times, the letters reveal him as a distant love-object.

Her first novel is dedicated to the popular French writer, who was a devotee of Surrealism and a friend of Sartre. Queneau's letters to Murdoch appear to have been lost.

In 1947, when Murdoch takes up the offer of a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, she tells Quineau that she has "started writing the novel about the Bogus scholar and the Archaic Goddess which has been in my head so long".

A month later, she confides that her "Work in Progress hasn't got far yet (not far enough, notably, for me to ruin it. This usually happens about Chapter IV). I will let you see it, but later (tho' I feel rather ill at the thought of you reading it)."

She goes on to talk about the difficulty of judging her own work and her suspicion that what she has produced is "worthless."

"While I am writing it, it's always surrounded by such an aura of creative aspiration & joy & clairvoyance and what not, it seems better than it is.

"Then afterwards the light is withdrawn & it seems quite dead and worthless. Just now I'm still in the clairvoyant stage & knowing the secrets of the seas."

Another idea for a book which reoccurs in Murdoch's letters is based on the concept of telepathy, the transfer of thoughts or feelings between individuals without the use of the senses.

In May 1946 she tells Queneau that she has been inspired by a book by Whately Carington, a British parapsychologist and psychical investigator.

A month later she admits she has abandoned her own writings for the present.

"The novel on Carington's telepathy theory has reached a sort of airy witty flashing perfection in my head which I should undoubtedly spoil by putting pen to paper," she writes.

However, later, while at Cambridge in 1947, she mentions she is again working on a novel based on the idea and send's Queneau a copy of Carington's book Telepathy: "His theory, though wrong I've no doubt, is interesting. (The novel I am writing – or "writing" – now is based on an idea cribbed from Carington)," she said.

There is no further mention of the novel. Then in 1952, she refers to a work in progress that is probably Under the Net, the story of struggling writer Jake Donoghue which in 2005 was chosen by Time magazine as one of the hundred best 20th century English-language novels.

"For some time now I have been writing a novel, a continuation of one I started two years ago," she writes. "If it turns out to be any use (about this I still don't know), I shall dedicate it to you."

Professor Peter Conradi, the author's official biographer, said: "Iris Murdoch's first novel has an extraordinary confidence that many first novels lack. She has this assurance because she was willing to abandon or destroy her early works.

"The Queneau letters are important in terms of showing what it is like to be a struggling writer. Her first novel was a huge success and led to a boost of confidence.

"We tend to remember the confident Iris Murdoch rather than the anguish involved in her early writing that the letters show."